Search is changing: how South Africans are starting to discover businesses through AI

For twenty years, “being found” meant one thing: ranking on Google. That assumption is quietly breaking. A growing share of people now begin the hunt for a product, a service or a supplier not in a search box but in a conversation with an AI — and they often get their answer without ever clicking a website at all. Here is what the research actually says, and what it means for a business that wants to be found.

The number that got everyone’s attention

In early 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026, as search marketing cedes ground to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.1 Analyst predictions are not gospel — but this one named a date and a magnitude, and the behaviour since has pointed the same way.

People are already starting in the chatbot

This is not a forecast about the distant future. Bain & Company found that 15% of consumers already start their searches with a generative-AI chatbot — rising to about a quarter of millennials and Gen Z.2 And the audience is enormous: OpenAI said ChatGPT had passed 800 million weekly active users by late 2025.3 A habit that big does not stay confined to homework and email drafts; it spills into “which one should I buy” and “who does this near me”.

Even inside Google, the click is disappearing

The shift is not only about people leaving Google for ChatGPT — it is happening inside Google too. The Pew Research Center, using real browsing data, found that when an AI summary appeared at the top of the results, users clicked a normal link only 8% of the time, versus 15% when there was no summary — and only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself.4 Bain put it more bluntly: around 60% of searches now end without a click to any website.2

The answer increasingly arrives on the results page, or in the chat. The website that the answer is built from may never get the visit — unless it is the source the AI names.

And the traffic that does arrive is better

There is a more hopeful side to this. The visitors who do come through from AI are unusually valuable. Adobe Analytics tracked generative-AI referral traffic to US retail sites rising more than 1,200% between mid-2024 and early 2025,5 and reported that by the 2025 holiday season those AI-referred visitors were converting more, spending more time on site and viewing more pages than other channels.6 People who arrive on a recommendation are pre-qualified — they were told you are the answer before they ever landed.

What this means — and what it doesn’t

The honest version of this story is not “search is dead”. Google is not vanishing, and SEO still matters enormously (in fact it is the foundation AI visibility is built on). The accurate version is that discovery is fragmenting: it now runs across Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity at once, and a meaningful and rising share of it resolves without a click. Being invisible to that layer is no longer a minor gap — it is a slow leak of customers you never see leave.

One caveat for a local audience: most of the hard numbers above are US data. We have not found equivalent published South African figures, so treat them as directional rather than precise. But the underlying behaviour — asking an assistant instead of scrolling a results page — is not country-specific, and South Africans use the same engines.

The takeaway for a small business

You cannot control how people search. You can control whether the engines they use can find, understand and recommend you. That means the basics done well (a crawlable, well-structured, trustworthy site that is indexed beyond just Google) and then the AI-specific layer on top. The first step is simply knowing where you stand — whether, today, an AI naming the best option in your category would name you.